gee, i'm glad you all know finnish composers so well and have shared that information with the rest of us. by and large, though, you seem to have missed adam's point, which is that it sucks ass to write a tossup specifically to un-exclusify a clue like "this finnish composer." while i'm sure it would be possible to write a decent question on a second-tier composer, it would be too hard for *almost* any tournament, and if written in the way that doug o'neal (or maybe somebody else) suggested a few posts back, it would just be a hose. a tossup on hertzsprung, incidentally, would also suck for other reasons. to a scientist, he's really, really only known for one thing; so an entire tossup on him would necessarily be biographical and useless to an actual astrophysicist until the giveaway. (somebody correct me if i'm mistaken on hertzsprung in particular; i don't remember learning anything else about him in my one astrophysics class, but that's not exactly conclusive. regardless, though, my point holds.) these are bad, baaaad science questions. science biography bad. while we're on the subject, i'm unhappy with the ICT tossup on the larson (larsson? larsen?) ice shelf. not because it was about a non- ross ice shelf, but because it mentioned "this ice shelf" before saying "ross," thereby awarding the winner of a buzzer race in practically every room with a -5. you can't write questions explicitly to hose people. that's bad writing. even if you're one of those players that puts up great TU/I ratios and thinks people should be less aggressive early in the question, that doesn't give you a right to put traps like that into tossups to penalize those nasty players who buzz in lot and occasionally get some wrong. i guess what i am trying to say is that canon expansion, while on the whole not a bad thing, is often done for the wrong reasons. you should write a question on a finnish composer because his music is great and you want people to know about him, not because "i'm sick of people buzzing with sibelius and being right." that'll almost guarantee that the resulting question will be better-written and more interesting. joon
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